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How many times are we going to do this? Really now, it's getting absurd.

I'm old enough to have Columbine burned into my mind forever, as I was a teen myself when the massacre took place. The media immediately looked for answers, and found them in the fact that the killers sometimes played Doom.

Then there was Virginia Tech, an even worse slaughter by a young man. I'll never forget this moment in an on-camera interview with two of the killer's roommates. I can't recall the exact wording, but it went something like:

Interviewer: What did he do when you were living with him? Did you ever see him playing video games on his computer?

Roommate: No, he really just spent all his time typing in Word.

Interviewer: You're sure? He never played any violent video games at all?

Roommate: No, he just wrote all the time.

It was assumed games were a cause of the violence before it was even established if he'd played them or not, which he hadn't.

Now we have the case of Norway mass murderer Ander Behring Breivik. In this case, he says that he not only was a big World of Warcraft player, but he used Call of Duty to "train" for the massacre. As such, we now have headlines like this:

It's still astonishing to me how supposedly smart individuals in the media persist in blaming video games for atrocities of this nature. To say that Call of Duty was a significant factor in these murders ignores the fact that there are probably 10 million COD players that did NOT go on a mass killing spree last year. In fact, only one did. I'm not a statistics major, but I think we're in logic hell here. Perhaps we should also examine his toothpaste brand and shoe preference as well? Could those have driven him to these horrible acts?

The obvious notion is that someone with a deranged mind who wants to kill would be drawn to a violent game, as they would other violent media. But this idea that violent media drives people to kill is a notion that keeps being repeated year after year, despite no factual evidence supporting it. It's a misguided thought championed by people who don't know the difference between correlation and causation.